Looks like a good cause and idea.
Seems more like a rasp.pi sort of deal though, which is maybe their intent, though i can't imagine many backing this as that's a smaller niche than the general computer user or gamer.

Also comes down a lot to their documentation. They say they are releasing it, but it could be piss poor for all you know and a minefield to move through.

Once completed, the Parallella computer should deliver up to 45 GHz of equivalent CPU performance

Click to expand...

That's quite a large claim. I expected some tricky words to the likes of "1/10 scale model", but really what CPU is this 45ghz equivilent to? Equivilent to a 45Ghz ARM-9 processor (the one they are using)?

How does that compare to a 4.5GHz i5/i7 ?

Anyway, looks really interesting and at the minimum would be quite fun to play around with, and great for people that need computer services at the cheap.

It's resource practicality is yet to be proven to me though. The video they have ran math/sci/eng, which i can only assume is no better than saying 3dmark scores directly correlate to ingame performance.

on the flip side, this could show to be really powerful for folders etc. Actually, if this could fold better than a gpu, you could run so many of these for penuts. (I haven't folded ever though, so im speaking out of my ass here).

Unfortunately the performance will depend entirely on support, which will depend entirely on the user base, which will depend entirely on the performance.

If Google had said "Android is going to be built around Epiphany cores" and proceeded to persuade thousands of developers to write apps that utilised the hardware, it would be great. Since that hasn't happened, I strongly suspect that very nearly all of these boards will end up using the ARM chip, with the Epiphany cores idle.

OP: just a quick note, it's a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9, not ARM9. ARM9 is the old architecture (before the ARM Cortex-A8 and ARM11).

Yeah I kicked in. Sounds like a nice effort. Their 4th gen Epiphany boards will be based on engineering samplers as far as I know, so won't have the same level of 'quality' as their gen III product. This is the reason as to why their gen IV product is so much more expensive compared to gen III.

We are working towards being able to offer the Parallella boards and other add-ons for pre-purchase at Parallella.org for everyone that missed the deadline. Exact prices and delivery schedules are being worked out now.